Atheism

What does atheism mean to me? It’s certainly not, in my view, a thesis about religion. Figures like Dawkins and Hitchens are as bad as the theists I joust with. It’s not even a thesis about the supernatural or the magical or the divine. No, to me atheism is a thesis about masters. It’s a rejection of all masters, whether they be divinities, kings, fathers, mothers, intellectual figures we fawn over; anything raised over the rest. Atheism is the recognition that there is no being, divine or otherwise, that is deserving of the place of master or sovereign. It’s a war against all fathers, and mothers as well, that would occupy the position of sovereign. It’s a commitment to fraternity and sorority and other unheard of ways of relating to humans and nonhumans on a flat plane besides. As a consequence, my Wiccan or Christian brothers, sisters, mammals, and animals might sometimes be a better atheist than my materialist friends. For atheism is a synonym for anarchism, that which is without arche or sovereign, not a synonym for that which rejects myth and magic. Atheism is a synonym for those that would fight any would-be gods, whether they be divinities or fathers or kings or leaders. And the problem with so many “atheists” is that they still remain so patriarchal, heteronormative, and committed to masters, leaders, and kings. They still make ad hominem models of reasoning and argumentation, where “ad him” has the very precise meaning not of “insult”, but of thinking there’s something important about the person who speaks where right, justice, and truth are concerned. We need a better effort from our atheist brothers and sisters, for they remain all too theist, even as they reject the supernatural. In Lacanian terms, we need an effort– the only true anarchist effort –to abolish the discourse of the master and any and all patriarchies (which are synonyms for theisms). Atheism targets not so much an end to divinities– thought perhaps that too –as an end to fathers, kings, mothers, and masters… To that which transcends the leviathan. It is the rejection of your he thesis that anyone and anything is ever a legitimate occupier of a place of authority or knowledge. It wills only an egalitarianism of actors.

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6 Responses to “Atheism”

Thanks a lot for this, Levi. It’s an encouraging olive branch for those of us religious folks who are still intrigued by your insights and working on a similar front. It reminds me of a passage I came across by Erich Fromm (on Richard Beck’s blog “Experimental Theology”):

[T]he principle shared by all radical humanists is that of negating and combating idolatry in every form and shape–idolatry, in the prophetic sense of worshiping the work of one’s own hands and hence making man subservient to things, in this process becoming a thing himself. The idols against which the Old Testament prophets fought were idols in wood and stone, or trees and hills; the idols of our day are leaders, institutions, especially the State, the nation, production, law and order, and every man-made thing. Whether or not one believes in God is a question secondary to whether or not one denies idols. The concept of alienation is the same as the Biblical concept of idolatry. It is man’s submission to the things of his creation and to the circumstances of his doing. Whatever may divide believers and non-believers, there is something which unites them if they are true to their common tradition, and that is the common fight against idolatry and the deep conviction that no thing and no institution must ever take the place of God…

This post also recalls the fine book by Adam S Miller that you introduced, Levi. ‘Speculative Grace’ describes a Latourian ‘grace’ of (in my understanding, however limited) material immanence, a kind of radical allowing and open embeddedness in the world. I would equate your ‘master’ with the role Miller (and Latour?) reserves for ‘transcendence’. In my view the most important commitment is to observe not the ‘master’ from without but the one from within – the one I posit in the conditioned nature of my speech and actions: am I unconsciously aiming to be or have that master. It seems the very core of discourse contains the seeds of this desire to be master or mastered. Can we dialogue without this unconscious will to dominate – if not gone – is at least backgrounded to what you describe as a will for fraternity and collaboration?

Some people and things are my masters, though perhaps not in the sense that you mean. As a goldsmith, I wrought the metal into shapes; shapes not of my will so much as what we – it and I could accomplish together. The metal is my master and my guide and the medium of my will. It is a bit complex.

My master in martial arts is anybody who teaches me. My masters in theoretical structures are those from whom I learn – an immanent transience, or a transient immanence.

Theisms are not necessarily communicable objects, despite their tacit presence as such. For me, theism induces social narcolepsy in that it can manifest as a monism. The machinics of monisms exclude radical othernesses. The ‘foreign’ is ground out in the genesis of the monad. Some of the foreign (the un-cognisable) arrives inside the monad as evil, while far larger portions of what is ‘foreign’ exist in the realms of sublime ignorance, or machinic unknowing. A monad is a compression, a distillation of potential; one distilled through the alembic of desire for certitude – however temporal. A monad is therefore extremely heavy to carry around. A monad can be usefully thought of as a calliper – a perhaps necessary devise to assist/hinder mobility.

As to atheism being a rejection of all masters; I find much succour in the living presence – my projected conceits – of masters in my life. I think perhaps we deploy the term ‘masters’ differently. I have experienced great antipathy in the West to the notion of ‘master’ – and yes, the baggage immuring the term is considerable, but not unassailable.

Finally, your ‘egalitarianism of actors’ scares me as an object. I get a picture of a heraldic shield with a Monad Rampant – a blood red machine on a dark blue ground. This is my visceral response. Structurally, I have a question; how can you impose such a lens and not deploy a monad? Though I was really stimulated by your views, I cannot fathom the ontics at play here.

To me, atheism is not the rejection of any set of ideas, such as existence of an entity that humans are incapable of perceiving. Such an entity is logically possible – as entertained in the sci-fi novel “His Master’s Voice” by Stanislaw Lem. My atheism is the objection to religious discourse cum ritual which eschews rational critique in favor of moral critique and recitation of memes. I have certain respect for theists like, say, Pierre Teilhard deChardin, who tried to think outside the box of both theology and science and ended up with accepting the idea of god which turned out to be synonymous with the universe at some point in time. OTOH, I have no patience with atheists who reject the other-worldly theological doctrine but retain religious ritual based on moral critique and recitation of memes.

Hi, Levi. I don’t have a synoptic-enough view of your work to know whether you take the stand against authority to be an irreducible choice/preference, or to be premised on an argument that sovereignty is destructive because it involves a fundamental falsehood of some kind. I lean toward the latter, but I’d be interested to know how you think about the alternative, whether you’ve treated or rejected it in a previous post, etc. J.